Take a Break

For when you're feeling a little burned out on homeschooling

Are you feeling dog-tired right about now? If so, you’re not alone. Source.

If you are feeling a little burned out on homeschooling at this time of year, perhaps it is time for a little break.

I don’t mean that you should stop homeschooling for good (unless your family discerns this, of course). I mean that you should stop striving for a hot second. For a day, a week, or two weeks…just long enough for you to breathe, regroup, rest, and observe. Stop right now.

A funny thing happens when you stop trying to make homeschooling happen and you just sit back and observe for a little bit. Maybe you’ve noticed it before, maybe right after you’ve had a baby or during a school break week. If you sort of quietly decide that you’re not going to make school happen, very often, it has a way of happening anyways. Maybe not in the form or to the extent that it would have happened if you’d kept a tight hold of the reins, but if you take yourself off the hook and just watch — not allowing the kids to descend into watching TV all day, but also not giving them schoolwork to do — you may observe some wonderful things.

One of three good things is likely to happen:

1. If you have not announced that school is not happening, sometimes the kids get out their math automatically, and you can help them along with it if they ask you to. And if they ask, “What should I do now, Mom?” you can direct them to their independent reading, too, or suggest they get down the cookbook and bake something. Pretty soon you’ll realize you’ve done school that day without meaning to — and the kids are none the wiser, but you are now feeling more peaceful and relaxed. Don’t think about the things you haven’t done from your regular school to-do list; instead, look at what you did do with hardly any effort at all.

2. If you have announced it, one or more of the kids may come after a day or two and ask you if they can still do some school thing that they enjoy (or they may just do it without asking). One of my daughters did that this morning (we are on a break the week that I am writing this), asking if she could keep working on her reader. We sat down to do so and my 6th grader ambled over and watched. After a while I asked him if he would help her while I checked my email. When I came back, he had gotten out the white board and written words on it to help her. Not everybody asked to do school, and not everybody did, but those two did! Hurray!

3. The kids take on projects that are, now that you think of it, of great educational benefit. They are building massive block cities. They are baking. They are playing with different paper airplane designs. They are throwing rocks onto the iced-over pond and observing the sounds they make. They are reading in various nooks throughout the house. They are building a fort outside. They are asking to walk to town independently to buy donuts. They are playing epic games of Risk or Robin Hood or whatever. They are making up a language for their stuffed animals. They are writing letters to their friends.

It’s astonishing.

Of course, most kids are also eventually going to start bickering and becoming discontented, unless you have figured out a pure unschooling approach that works in your context. Maybe chaos will begin to reign after a week, or maybe even after a day. Having reasonable levels of structure in your home is a good thing, and you’ll know when to say “time to do school!” again because you will have that sudden internal parental flash that tells you, These kids need more work!

So it’s not stopping forever, but rather responding to your stress and anxiety and overwhelm by stopping long enough to remind yourself of all the good that is actually, really, truly happening in your home and homeschool.

This time of year can be difficult, and sometimes it feels like the school year’s home stretch is never-ending. It’s a great time to remind yourself that although your hour-to-hour, day-to-day work in the homeschool matters greatly, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface in those kids and in your family, nurtured by the way you’re raising and educating your children, that you don’t always see unless you stop working so hard for a moment and just look. Maybe your homeschooling is not as dependent on your striving and perfectionism as you think.

Take a break, and let us know how it goes.